Are you wondering how to get approval from the powers that be for your market research survey incentives budget? Your boss may be unwilling to approve your budget if he or she doesn’t understand the value of sending survey participants an incentive upon completion. It’s your job to educate those decision-makers on why you need a budget for survey incentives so that they get on board with the project. This article will show you how to get your survey incentives budget approved.
Likely, your boss will have questions, so the best way to get your survey incentives budget approved is to prep beforehand so you have those answers. Here are some questions you should have answers to before walking into that meeting.
Managers need to see a clear return on investment. Be prepared to provide an explanation of the goals and expected results of the initiative. For example,
“Our goal is to get a response rate of 20%. We expect to improve our customer service KPI by 10% with the feedback we receive from this survey.”
If you have data on past response rates, you can show that maybe numbers weren’t high for survey responses in the past (that didn’t include incentives), and explain that research shows incentivizing a survey can increase survey response rates. Express that your company needs to value the time of survey respondents, and the best way to do that is to offer an incentive that is compelling enough to get them to complete the survey.
The more responses you receive to your survey, the more reliable the data. The better the data, the more confident you can be of the insights from your market research project. The stronger the data the more you mitigate the risk of decisions made from the results of your research project.
The consequence of getting fewer responses is also important to understand. Your data can get skewed or be unreliable if you do not get a good number of representative responses.
Why do you need the maximum number of responses? Well, squeaky wheel syndrome, for one. This is a bias that often afflicts customer experience surveys when only the customers who have had a bad experience want to respond to your surveys. Meanwhile, all those other customers who had a good experience don’t feel motivated to respond to your survey. Drawing conclusions from such unreliable data can put your business at risk.
By offering incentives you’re more likely to get more responses, more representative responses, and therefore more dependable data. The more people you can offer it to in your target demographic, the larger the response potential.
The answer to this depends on a few factors. To answer this question, focus on the ROI.
Stress the value of the data that the survey will provide to the company. If you’re sending a survey on customer service, it’s well worth a few dollars to get insights that could save the company thousands…or keep it from losing significant revenue due to an issue you wouldn’t have uncovered otherwise.
Survey incentives are critical for your research project for many reasons. More responses mean more data that allows your company to make better business decisions. The data you get from the surveys can help the company uncover valuable insights that can save it money or help it bring in more revenues. What boss doesn’t like to hear that?
On the other hand, poor response rates may mean that you have so little data that the company ends up making poor business decisions, which can cost money down the road. Investing in survey incentives is an investment in the data that will power the future growth and improvement of the company.
Don’t forget to mention that digital rewards that go unclaimed get refunded, which means the company isn’t out any money for incentives that weren’t claimed.
The key to getting your incentives budget approved is to plan ahead. Understand what your manager will ask, and be ready with hard data to help them make that decision in your favor.
Want to learn more about how to improve your surveys? Download our free Survey Optimization Checklist today!
Brenda has over 20 years of experience building, selling and marketing products for F100 and start-ups.
Brenda has over 20 years of experience building, selling and marketing products for F100 and start-ups.
